DreamIt All Access: How a Collaboration Between DreamIt Health and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Led to Haystack Informatics

DreamIt All Access is a feature article series where we interview and feature the stories of startups that have gone through the DreamIt Ventures program with a focus on DreamIt Philly. DreamIt Ventures is a venture capital and seed accelerator firm focusing on early stage venture investing. Through its accelerator programs, DreamIt has helped entrepreneurs launch over 200 companies. You can learn more about DreamIt here. These interviews have been slightly edited from the original for clarity and length.

Bimal: It basically started with a discussion I had with the privacy officer at CHOP. A patient's right to privacy is protected by federal law, so in a hospital, this means we have to monitor whoever accesses paper and electronic records. Hospitals typically split this task across the groups charged with information security and privacy/compliance, and every hospital in the country faces a huge challenge when monitoring privacy of electronic health records (EHR) since it's extremely hard to track all the different access events.This is why we designed Haystack. I was experimenting with some open source visualization tools and it became very clear that you could analyze access log data to basically determine inappropriate behavior. When you analyze EHR access log records, the data organize into social networks. Patients and providers in these clusters of activity tend to work together, as you would expect in a care team. Our bet was that we could get enough information from EHR access logs to discern if a trusted insider was trying to snoop on a patient's record, if people were trying to commit medical fraud, or if people were trying to commit medical identity theft. The entire application is very intuitive, very visual. It helps privacy officers detect and report privacy breaches a lot better than other tools for this.Q: How did you guys meet each other?

Adrian: The first time we saw our product working, that was incredible. It was one of the first milestones. Then obviously, getting the first customer. Reaching a billion records was also very exciting. Graduating from DreamIt was also a milestone in itself. Bimal: The first time we completed a cloud installation was very exciting. One of the early validations we had was when I made a few dozen calls to privacy officers around the country to get feedback on our wireframe mockups and to see if they might want to be pilot sites. I remember I was talking to one of them, and at the end of my presentation, I asked what do you think? And she told me "when I saw those wireframes, I was jumping out of my seat!" It was so compelling for her that somebody finally understood her specific information needs as a privacy officer and was able to address it in a very thoughtful way. That showed me that we were on to something. Q: What are some of the biggest lessons you guys have learned?

Bimal: You have to identify a real problem to solve in healthcare. You have to find something that is a real sore spot, whether on the patient care or administrative side, then you have to apply some insight on how it can be done differently.